


The Straight and Narrow Path They Showed Me

by Opalgirl



Series: Mass Effect Stuff Collection [4]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 16:04:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8378611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opalgirl/pseuds/Opalgirl
Summary: After destroying the Reapers, Ada Shepard (Colonist/Ruthless, Renegon) gets to go home.





	

She wakes up, covered by clean cotton sheets, with sunlight–real sunlight, not artificial–streaming through an open window. No thrum of engines beneath the floor, no beeping of the comm system, or the sound of the air recycler kicking in.

The air smells like cut hay and a flower that she ought to know the name of, but can’t place.

She gets up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed she’s in. Nothing is quite clear, the edges blurred as if she’s dreaming–or as if someone’s smeared grease on the cameras she thinks and laughs. The floor is solid beneath her feet, not rocking with the movement of a ship through a relay and Ada takes a moment to look around.

The walls are grey metal–colonial pre-fab but someone has tried to make it brighter. Flowers in a vase on the top of a tall dresser, posters on a wall, books–real books–on a shelf. When she peers at the titles of the books on the shelf, forcing it to focus in, she realizes.

It’s the bedroom she had as a teenager, down to the very last detail. Her sweater hanging off the back of her desk chair, the pre-fab walls that she’d been so bored with and the books.

Newton and Hawking and Tesla and the volume of Poe her father had loaned her for school all on the desk, and Twain and Shakespeare and Hughes and Tennyson and Williams and Cohen and Byron and a biography of one of her famous namesakes on the shelf.

She has never  _ loved  _ Tennyson, not like her father had, she thinks, and shakes her head. She must be dreaming because she  _ can’t  _ be here. This room hasn’t existed in fifteen years.

She rubs at her eyes, expecting the view of her old room to fade away and be replaced by her quarters or a cell (where she rightly belongs). But it doesn’t. It’s still there, and she swears that she can hear a child–her brother?–laughing and a dog barking.

Her bedroom door slides open with a soft whoosh, and she’s standing in the short hallway, steps away from the kitchen. 

 The rest of the house appears empty but that same flower-print curtain is still above the window over the sink. The teapot is still on the stove, her father’s coffee mug is on the counter, and her mother’s tall blue boots are by the door, mud around the soles.

She crosses the kitchen, surprised how solid it seems to be, how it seems to be coming into focus for her and steps outside through the front door.

There’s an overjoyed bark and a large streak of yellow barrels across the yard, slamming into her legs. Ada  _ laughs _ , surprised at how easily it rises in her chest and how it doesn’t seem to be weighted down, and kneels in the dust.

“Kova!” she says, and ruffles the ears of her brother’s dog. “Hi, girl.” She’d never thought to see the family dog again.

Tereshkova barks, lunges up, and tries to wash her face.

“No, Kova–c’mon, girl. Where’s  _ maman _ ?” she asks the dog, who watches her with intelligent brown eyes, her head tilted slightly and her tail wagging. “Where’s Papa? Where’s Alan?”

At the mention of Ada’s little brother, arguably her favourite human,  Kova barks sharply and trots off across the yard, toward the back of the house, and stops, looking back, her tail still wagging. That’s a clear sign to follow, so Ada gets back up and does.

Alan and her father are sitting underneath the shade of the big tree together, a book held between them; of course there’s a book, it’s her father–and her mother is standing next to one of the flower beds, barefoot in the dirt, wearing a worn shirt that once had the logo of her university on it and a pair of jeans.

“Ada,  _ ma belle _ ,” her mother says, turning her head, a sad sort of half-smile on her face. God, she even looks the same. Her hair braided and twisted up underneath a pink and green printed scarf to protect it from the sun. “ _ Mon coeur, que-ce que c'est passé? _ You shouldn’t be here.”

“ _ Mère _ ,” she says, and wants to cry, can feel it welling up in her chest and throat, when it hasn’t, not in years. “You’re dead. This–this isn’t real.”

“ _ Oui, ma belle. _ And you shouldn’t be, not yet.  _ Que-ce que c'est passé?" _

What happened? If Ada tells her, her mother–or this memory or dream or something–of her mother will never believe her. She’ll break her mother’s heart with what she’s done, what she’s become. She bites down on the inside of her cheek for a second, refusing to cry even though she could. “ _ Oú sommes-nous? _ ” she asks.

“You–you’re dead, baby.” Her father’s voice, strong and steady, from behind her. “Like us. This is–”

“The afterlife,” Ada finishes for him, realizing, remembering. She’s dead, her body somewhere in the ruins of the Citadel.

“You could call it that.”

“It looks like home.” Just like home.

“You’ve earned your rest,  _ mon coeur _ .”

* * *

 Time passes—or doesn’t—in a weird way wherever she’s ended up and she can’t bring herself to let her parents know what she became while she was alive, what kind of person she turned into. She won’t break her mother’s heart, hurt her father, or terrify her brother. Instead Ada turns to her father’s library.

 She reads anything that catches her eye, even if she’s read it before--Hemingway, Morrison, Heinlein, Whitman, Hurston, Dumas, Kafka, Williams, Dickens—and then begins finding books that she _knows_ weren’t in her father’s collection when she was a kid. Reeves, Chandrasekhar, Dirac, Tyson, Descartes, Kepler, Turing, Payne. Almost as if the space she’s inhabiting now is shaping itself to suit her.

 She’s reading an _awful_ biography of Jon Grissom and is considering trying the Russians again (it would be better than _this_ ), when her father joins her, sitting on the grass next to her.

 “Grissom, eh?” he says, nodding to her book. “How is it?”

 Ada sets it aside, shaking her head. “It’s… _bad_. You know, I met his daughter once. Never asked about her father, but I bet she could do him more justice than…that.”

 He nods in agreement of her assessment and claps her on the shoulder with one hand and Ada very nearly flinches. When she was _alive_ people didn’t touch her so freely and if they did, she couldn’t feel it as much through armor. Now it rattles her, jostles her nerves. “You okay, baby?” he asks and she forces her back to stay straight, refusing to curl in on herself.

 She bites the inside of her lip, breathes through her nose, and says nothing. If she talks now she’ll fall apart.

 “You know,” her father says, glancing at her and she _can’t_ meet his eyes, she can’t, as her mind runs in a hundred directions, “we couldn’t watch you often—seems like if you linger too long on a person that’s still alive, the universe gets annoyed—but we did, a little. Just your mother and I.”

 No. No, no, no, no. Her head spins and her heart rate climbs, no longer resting, and she wants to _run_. Where to she doesn’t know, doesn’t care, but sitting still and having to finally hear what her parents think of all the shit she’s done….

 “Your mama cried for you when she saw what you’d been through. She understands, I promise. Don’t pull away from her because you think you’re sparing her. You gave it everything you had to give and then some, Ada, _mon coeur_ , and I’m proud of you.”

 It doesn’t make _sense_. The shock of those words feels like he’s slapped her. “Three hundred _thousand_ dead,” she says, leaning down so her head’s between her knees, “because of a choice I made. Billions more dead because I couldn’t get anyone to _listen to me_.  Three-quarters of my squad dead because I couldn’t keep it together in the field and _ordered_ them to their deaths and I don’t even remember it. That’s not something you—”

 “Your mother watched you help evacuate scared kids off a station,” her father interrupts, his voice firm. “I watched you save colonists who were being ignored or buried in bureaucracy, just like us. We watched you stay on a destroyed ship until every surviving hand was safe. We watched you, half-dead, push through to _get the job done_. You made mistakes. We all do, and people fall apart under a hell of a lot less. _That_ , I’m damn well proud of.”

 “But, you—I—Dad?” She doesn’t know how to process this.

 “‘Everything we do has a result. But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad’,” he quotes, reaching out and gently pulling her back by her shoulder so she’s sitting upright again.

 Ada sighs. “All right, point,” she concedes, “but if you start quoting Thoreau at me, I’m not listening to you.”

 He laughs. “Never gained an appreciation for Thoreau, I see. Did you ever get around to Kerouac?”


End file.
